In My Crafty World, Sat May 19th

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, sovaldi sale and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, glands but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, pilule and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

After I’d finished both of those, I still had some time on the plane, so I worked more on Tony’s Crooked Little Scarf, which is now almost 16 inches long:

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

This week I received my first shipment of the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club, and I have started to make the scarf that comes with the kit. This is my third weaving project on my rigid heddle loom, and I like how it’s coming out:

I would love to take a weaving class and learn more about how to do patterns with sticks, so I can make a houndstooth scarf for Tony. But maybe I should finish his other scarf, first….
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!

First installment of the Mythic Fiber Club

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, sovaldi sale and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, glands but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, pilule and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

After I’d finished both of those, I still had some time on the plane, so I worked more on Tony’s Crooked Little Scarf, which is now almost 16 inches long:

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

This week I received my first shipment of the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club, and I have started to make the scarf that comes with the kit. This is my third weaving project on my rigid heddle loom, and I like how it’s coming out:

I would love to take a weaving class and learn more about how to do patterns with sticks, so I can make a houndstooth scarf for Tony. But maybe I should finish his other scarf, first….
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
So, pills I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, recipe and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
So, pills I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, recipe and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
So, pills I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, recipe and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, phthisiatrician I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
So, pills I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, recipe and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, phthisiatrician I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, contagion I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, online and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, drug and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
So, pills I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, recipe and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, phthisiatrician I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, contagion I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, online and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, drug and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and
So, pills I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, recipe and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some Targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, phthisiatrician I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, contagion I went to the Wild and Woolly Weekend this weekend. I drove up Friday after work, online and arrived at the Golden Stage Inn around 9 pm, drug and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done.

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.
Today I received my very first shipment of the Gnomespun Yarn and Fiber Arts Mythic Fiber Club. It is a *gorgeous* green-with-browns, search on Manx Loaghtan. Various sources say it has a staple length of 3 inches and a micron count of 28, and is classified as a “primitive breed”.

The colorway was inspired by the Egyptian goddess Heqet, and comes with an information sheet about the mythology of Heqet and a bit about the Manx Loaghtan breed. The information says it’s “lofty” and I’m not sure if that means it’s a “down” fiber, though it does feel “downy”.

The Gnomespun etsy shop has very little in it now, because he’s gearing up for all the festivals this month. But I highly recommend his fiber…I cannot wait to spin this!

Wild and Woolly Weekend

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, sovaldi sale and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, glands but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, pilule and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

After I’d finished both of those, I still had some time on the plane, so I worked more on Tony’s Crooked Little Scarf, which is now almost 16 inches long:

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

This week I received my first shipment of the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club, and I have started to make the scarf that comes with the kit. This is my third weaving project on my rigid heddle loom, and I like how it’s coming out:

I would love to take a weaving class and learn more about how to do patterns with sticks, so I can make a houndstooth scarf for Tony. But maybe I should finish his other scarf, first….
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


I know, decease I just posted a few days ago! I am excited and privileged to be attending the Wild & Woolly Weekend this weekend in Proctorsville, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s
I know, Vermont. I will be taking two classes, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:


So, and mostly I took my bag up to my room, showered, and went to sleep. More about the Inn later….

I woke up early the next morning and met another woman staying at the Inn who was also going to the Weekend, Barbara. Barbara and I talked during the delicious breakfast that Julie and Michael (the owners of the Inn) provided. As it turns out, she’s a spinner as well, and was taking the same classes I was on Saturday. Both classes were taught by Patty Blomgren, a local Vermont spinning instructor.

The first class was Textured Spinning – we went over a few ways to make textured yarn.

The first way was to use some washed but unprocessed fleece – pick and tease apart locks and other fibers, and just use as-is. Then we tried practicing an autowrap. Here’s the yarn I made as a result — it’s definitely textured!

picking and teasing, autowrap sample

I took the rest of the handfuls of unprocessed yarn and ran them through the drum carder – part of the fun of this workshop was playing with one of three drum carders Patty set up for us. So here is the batt I made with the same stuff as is in the yarn above – I have not spun this up yet, but when I do I will spin it worsted and see how much smoother that yarn can be.

batt with same fibers as yarn above

Then I made a colorway I like to call “Creamsicle”:

creamsicle batt

And I spun it into yarn:

Creamsicle yarn

Then I made a thick-and-thin yarn with some targhee from Spunky Eclectic that I’d brought:

thick and thin yarn

Patty had a handout for us, so we’d remember what we did. We did not get to any of the plying techniques officially, but we did make some knots, and I’ve made some bobbles before.

The second class, also with Patty, was corespun yarn. She also provided a handout. These techniques were much more tricky, and we didn’t get to nearly as many.

We did some basic core spinning with commercial yarn as the core. I used a two-ply wool, and found that wrapping roving around was easy once I got the basic motion down and used *very* little fiber. I’ve tried core spinning before and never really got the hang of it. I think the secret really is using a very little bit of roving/top to wrap around the core. Here is some of this first type of core spinning:

first core spun

I then used the thick and thin yarn around the core to make a different kind of core-spun yarn. The little “beads” or “beehives” in the yarn are the thick parts. The most obvious of these are the three on the very bottom, in blue/brown. There are tighter/less fuzzy ones in the 2nd yarn from the top edge, the red/brown yarn. In this sample I showed a lot of the core on purpose:

core spun with beehives and showing the core

I’m working on the rest of the thick and thin targhee, core spinning it over a core where I’m trying not to show the core. It’s mostly working:

thick and thin core spun, not showing core

It’s not totally perfect, but it’s looking good.

All of the yarn is very kinky when I first spin it. I wasn’t able to let any of this rest, as I just spun it this weekend, but I did wash the samples, and dry them under tension – I don’t normally do this, because it will just re-kink up on washing, but I wanted to see what the yarn would look like when it was less kinky. The stuff still on the bobbin is very kinky, and I’ll probably let it rest, and then wash it.

Unfortunately, the vendor times were exactly the same as the classes, so I did not get a chance to shop on Saturday. Luckily, I noticed this ahead of time, so I figured Sunday would be for shopping. At the end of the class, Patty let us raid her stash, so I took home some firestar, Ashland Bay merino/silk, and hand-dyed corriedale. I did have some fiber I gave away – I let Patty take some of the targhee, and I gave her the rest of my Louet Black Diamond, a carbonized bamboo that I did not enjoy spinning (it felt like spinning chalk powder, and has absolutely zero memory). I also gave Jennifer, a fellow classmate, some silk hankies that I wasn’t enjoying pulling apart to spin.

I did, however, win a door prize – a Knit Local canvas bag:

knit local tote bag

Saturday night Barbara and I went to DJ’s Restaurant for dinner, which was a good pick (on Julie’s recommendation). After that, I spun by the fireplace for a few hours, practicing what I’d learned that day.

Sunday I woke up, packed up, had breakfast and a nice long conversation with Julie and Michael, checked out and went to the festival again. A few pictures from the Inn:

pottery

The record player:

record player

These chickens were crossing the road. I wonder why?

why did these chickens cross the road?

A bunch of teapots at the Inn. I think my favorite is the fish one (just to the right of the cow one):

teapots!

This was my shopping day, and it was a lot of browsing and also a lot of talking to people. I started out helping a booth set up, and then bought a few magazines (Cast On and Piecework), and some “knit local” stickers and a “knit local” car magnet, some knitty gift tags and a brooch/shawl pin.

I bought a bunch of fiber, including some locally grown Shetland, some hand-dyed Falkland, and a few batts. I also won some flax in another door prize, and got some spinning done. I talked to a LOT of people, including Dave Paul of The Merlin Tree, maker of the HitchHiker and Road Bug spinning wheels. I spun on one and LOVED it, but resisted buying one:

hitchhiker spinning wheel

It was a great day, topped off with a visit with a friend in White River Junction, Vermont, then a visit with another friend near Manchester, NH, and then finally home to my husband and dinner.

In My Crafty World, Thu 26 April

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, sovaldi sale and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, glands but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, pilule and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

After I’d finished both of those, I still had some time on the plane, so I worked more on Tony’s Crooked Little Scarf, which is now almost 16 inches long:

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

This week I received my first shipment of the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club, and I have started to make the scarf that comes with the kit. This is my third weaving project on my rigid heddle loom, and I like how it’s coming out:

I would love to take a weaving class and learn more about how to do patterns with sticks, so I can make a houndstooth scarf for Tony. But maybe I should finish his other scarf, first….
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it.

Bought hand-carders, started carding the rest of the llama. I was getting a lot of dirt and still had to pick out the hay, so I decided to wash what was left of the llama yearling to see if the dirt and hay would come out. The dirt did, the hay, not so much.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, nurse but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, hepatitis and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, decease speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, diagnosis but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, read and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, disinfection speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged about my crafty world. Last weekend I went to a conference and afterwards surprised my mother by showing up at her Mother’s Day brunch, and the weekend before was a quiet weekend at home.

I finally finished the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece, otolaryngologist and it’s a great sweater-dress on her right now. I think she could get 2 years’ worth of use from this, this year as a dress, next year as a sweater:

And then I realized I had a friend with an impending baby to be born and I hadn’t made anything, so I quickly whipped up the Hoot Cardigan, which I saw Lucy Lee knitting at her weekly knitting group at Mind’s Eye Yarns now with an online store too! (note, I bought the grasshopper sky sock yarn a few weeks ago and still am in love with it) and I knew it would be perfect for the newest arrival in my tribe:

I have been working a bit on photography skills, and part of what I have learned is to not have anything directly on a background, because that will produce shadows that may skew the object a bit. The best thing to do is have the object hanging vertically somehow, and shaped (see how the Hoot Cardigan is done above?). So, in order to actually accomplish this for socks and gloves, I bought a plastic hand and clear plastic foot online. The foot looks very nice with the one completed Monkey Sock I’ve done:

Compare and contrast that with the pictures on my project page and you’ll see hands-down the plastic foot is the way to go.

Of course, this prompted my partner to tell me I had to stop buying body parts online.

I am currently working on the second Monkey Sock, so soon I will actually have a pair to wear!

I finished weaving the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club April offering – the “This Way and That” scarf:

I need to work on not beating so hard – I learned that I should only beat once, but as my friend and amazing weaver Anna Branner says, “beating is more like placing the yarn.” So, I know that for next time!

With all this traveling I’m doing, I’m trying to knit while traveling and spin while at home (I’m bringing my spindles on the longer trips). So last night I spun up the Gnomespun Mythic Fiber Club Heqet I received earlier this month. The Manx Loaghton spun like a dream, although there is a very obvious “right” end and “wrong” end. I deliberately spun this thick, instead of my usual fine stuff, and then plied 2 strands together. The 4 oz bump yielded 3 3/4 oz of yarn, 172 yards at 7 wpi. It is soft and squishy and downy.

I also practiced playing around with my camera’s ISO settings. This first pic is on the highest ISO setting, 1600, which is good for very dark indoor scenes:

And here it is at the lowest ISO setting, 80:

It’s still way too sunny out to take the perfect picture, but I was not going to wait until the sun was at a different angle to take the picture. Note how the yellows are very washed out in the top picture.

That’s what’s been going on in my crafty world!
I know, “spinning textured yarns” and “core spinning”. Both classes are on Saturday, so I figured I’d do classes on Saturday and shopping on Sunday.

This is a kate with 3 bobbins that are on semi-permanent “rest” until I can find something good to ply them with.

The top is remnants from an Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt that I made into a boucle yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn right now, so it might just need me to take it off the bobbin. Which I really ought to do, since I need all the bobbins I can get my hands on for this weekend! The middle is carbonized bamboo, which sounds neat, but it not a fun spin – it’s a little squeaky (like dried chalk powder rubbed together), and has no memory. I plied a lot of it with some wool, and that’s what I’m making Tony’s scarf out of. It’s plenty fine to knit with.

The bottom of the kate is the rest of the undyed silk that I spun. I wanted to spin and dye this in April, but I have no idea if I want to ply this together (and have silk yarn) or ply it with something else…and of course what I ply it with will probably determine how I dye it. So for now, it’s all spun up but resting on the bobbin, ready to be plied, to itself or something else.

This next lot is some nice blue metallic thread that I recovered from a sweater. The thread was accompanied by blue acrylic, which I threw away, because I just wanted the thread. It looks like it’s not a lot on the bobbin, but there really is – I measured it at 96 wpi (well, I measured 24 wraps for a 1/4 inch):

I also have no idea of what I want to do with the metallic blue thread, it will probably be put into a few different projects since I doubt I’ll make a sweater with it.

And finally, I started and finished spinning some small samples I got in February’s Phat Fiber Mixed Sampler Box. There was some silver sparkly yarn and some red yarn, so I spun them up and plied ’em together, and got this:

In My Crafty World, Sun April 22nd

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, grip first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, medications and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, sovaldi sale and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
A boucle I made – it’s not as loopy as it “should” be, but I think it’s a pretty good first attempt:

A closeup view:

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts,
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. But April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
It has been three weeks since my last update. I have been busy, glands but not hugely busy in a crafty sense. April is a busy month for me, pilule and as in years past I went to my industry’s annual big conference in California. It’s a week of running around, speaking at workshops, learning, and meeting people. Suffice it to say, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much crafting, but took a few projects with me anyway.

On the plane, I was able to finish a “baseball jersey-style” baby sweater for my coworker, who had a baby girl March 12th. It was mailed off last week.

So then I set to work on finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater for my niece. I got the body done, but had to switch to smaller needles for the sleeves…I did not have the smaller needles on me….I have since cast on a sleeve with a smaller needle. The picture is accurate, and yes, it looks like a giant sweater/dress with teeny arms. After I finish one sleeve I may have to size it up, because I have a feeling I may need to rip out the sleeve….or maybe it will look better once the sleeve is off the needle?

After I’d finished both of those, I still had some time on the plane, so I worked more on Tony’s Crooked Little Scarf, which is now almost 16 inches long:

I did not bring *any* spinning paraphernalia with me to the conference and have not had a ton of time to spin since coming back. However, I did spin a bit before I left, and have made a *bit* more progress with my fiber stashdown.

I spun up a small amount – 38 yards – of unknown fiber, probably shetland. I then dyed it apricot – who knew pink + green = apricot? Not me, but I sure was happily surprised that it worked!

And I spun up half of the 3.5 ounces of “Clown Parts”, the April 2012 batt from the Happy Hooves Batt Club from Enhcanted Knoll Farm. The batt is mostly Portuguese wool, with silk, silk noil and bamboo. I love this colorway more and more every day! This is 1.75 ounce, and I got 66 yards, spun woolen/long draw and then chain plied.

I think I will maybe make a Go Diagonal scarf on big needles, or something similar, to let the yarn speak for itself.

I do not remember posting about this – I had 1 oz of super-soft angora rabbit from The Yarn Marm, which I spun and gradient-dyed a vibrant purple:

I gradient-dyed it by making a very loose ball and dyeing the ball. I think it worked well, though 1 oz was not enough to get me used to spinning angora! It’s a very fuzzy spin, I spun it long draw/woolen, and then 2-plied it. 75 yards, 1 oz, 7 wpi.

I also ordered some llama yearling from The Yarn Marm when I ordered the rabbit. However, I did not read the listing properly, which stated there was dust and VM (vegetable matter) and I should have deduced that it meant it was raw. So after a while of attempting to spin it raw (there is no “grease” so that was not an issue), I finally bought hand-carders, and started carding the rest of the llama. I probably have spun half in the raw, then I started carding the rest. About halfway through the carding, with dust and VM getting everywhere (but I still had to stop and pick out VM) I started to wonder if washing first would help.

So last night I washed the rest of the llama yearling, that wasn’t already spun or carded. It’s currently drying, and after that I will card the rest of it. I’ll see if it’s easier to get more of the VM out now – very little came out during washing, but a LOT of dirt did come out, so that’s good.

This week I received my first shipment of the Spunky Eclectic Weaving Club, and I have started to make the scarf that comes with the kit. This is my third weaving project on my rigid heddle loom, and I like how it’s coming out:

I would love to take a weaving class and learn more about how to do patterns with sticks, so I can make a houndstooth scarf for Tony. But maybe I should finish his other scarf, first….

In My Crafty World, 1 April 2012

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.

In My Fiber World, Sun Mar 18th Version

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
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As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, resuscitation the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, cheapest and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, resuscitation the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, cheapest and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, resuscitation the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, cheapest and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, surgeon since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, viagra order so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, this site I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, traumatologist I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, website if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, decease then start blogging!
As a first post, ampoule I figured I should put here what I have been working on. All images are link to full-size images, ailment if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, viagra since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, prothesis I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, order I did in fact rip back the heel I’d started on the Monkey sock, and did it with a Sweet Tomato Heel. It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s Enchanted Knoll Farm Batt Club offering is a Shetland/silk blend called “Conversation Hearts”. Now, case I have only been spinning a year, illness but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, diet and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, resuscitation the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, cheapest and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, resuscitation the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, cheapest and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, illness I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, population health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, side effects I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, youth health so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, site 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, resuscitation the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, cheapest and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, plague 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, heart plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, prescription 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, recipe the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, heart plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, prescription 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, recipe the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, heart plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, prescription 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, recipe the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, heart plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, prescription 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, recipe the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, heart plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, prescription 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, recipe the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, more about I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, heart plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, prescription 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, recipe the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, sildenafil plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, thumb plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, clinic the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, see since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, internist the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, sick I went to Fiber Camp. Fiber Camp is not your usual fiber festival – now in its third year, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down sweater


I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!
I grabbed all the pictures I’ve taken in the past few weeks, infection so here’s a version of what’s going on with me, clinic based on the pictures I have. I know I just updated y’all yesterday, but today’s post has lots of pictures!

In the “knitting while traveling” series, first off is how to knit on a plane when you have a pattern:

Then there’s my answer to “how do I block a scarf in a hotel room”?

Unfortunately it’s a bit too pointy for my tastes, and I do want to re-block it:

Exactly a month ago, on Saturday, February 18th, I finished a Flower Scarf. What’s special about this scarf is that this started out as one ounce of white cashmere roving. I spun it, dyed it (with food coloring) and knit the scarf.

Here is a close-up that shows the color a little better (although it’s a bit washed out):

I acquired a loom while I was in California 2 weeks ago, and I have finished my first piece – the warp is a simple black cotton for weaving, and the weft is Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. This has not yet been blocked:

And I jumped right in and started another project – the warp is mercerized cotton and the weft is Jil Eaton CottonTail:

Here’s a more detailed shot:

I have continued to work on my niece’s Color Me Pretty sweater. I have just gotten to the point where I slip the sleeve stitches off and start working on only the body. This is the magical part of a raglan for me, as it’s when the piece actually starts looking like a sweater:

The yarn is a dark purple solid color, I’m not sure why the photo shows a gradient-type color.

Yesterday was a day full of shopping, and I picked up a seam ripper to finish getting all the cashmere I could out of the thrift store sweater I started on last week. I got the rest of the sweater pulled out and Navajo-plied it. It’s resting on the bobbin now, but I did have a full bobbin from Wednesday, which I took off, measured, bathed, and put up to dry. It dried this morning, and it’s close to 600 yards of what looks like a sock-weight yarn (I haven’t measured WPI yet, but it’s 3.75 ounces, or 109 grams):

I have been spinning more of the Hello Yarn BFL/silk that I talked about yesterday. I also took pictures of the fiber – here’s the fiber as a bump:

I think the colors show better as a braid, though:

I’ve spun up almost half (2 ounces). I’m thinking I might do a 2×2 cable with this yarn, but I’m not 100% sure. I will have to sample. I worry that the colors will muddy, but I think as a cable it will be more heathered. I’ve just split the yarn lengthwise into 4 parts, so there’s no fancy fractal spinning going on or anything, but I’m sure I didn’t divide it exactly equally.

In My Fiber World, Sat Mar 17th

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

You can download the PDF of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi‘s Sweet Tomato Heel.
Last weekend, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-b

I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, on the works in project – I have to re-block the Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.
I posted about 2 weeks ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf.

Cascade finally shipped the yarn I needed to make the Color Me Pretty sweater I want to make for my niece — because a few months ago, I showed her a sweater I was wearing that I knit and she said, “Aunt Sheeri, will you knit me something?” How could I say no? And then a few minutes later she said, “I have a secret to tell you. My favorite color is pink.” Which is not really a secret, but was really cute anyway. This is a top-down raglan sweater, and I have done the yoke so far and am just a few rows away from splitting off the sleeves:

I can’t wait to finish it!

I have also started spinning some fiber gifted to me when I was down in the dumps by my friend Jenn, who is not only a superb human being, but also has an entry in the JMF design contest. You should vote for her!

Fiber Camp Wrap-Up

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
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As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the
Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, I made both the single and 2-color version in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. It is also very warm and soft. You could easily adapt this pattern to be wider, it works on a 6-stitch repeat with 1 stitch on either side (so multiples of 6, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fry, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Joel Eagle, model Caroline Fryar, and Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.
It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve updated y’all on how my crafty world is going….

I’ve been focusing on spinning a bit, since I’ll be traveling in April for a conference and I know I won’t have a lot of spinning time so there’s no point bringing the wheel or spindles – I can knit during a workshop pretty unobtrusively, but spinning draws attention. And I knit on planes…so I know I’ll have knitting time, which is why I’m focusing on spinning.

Also the Ravelry group for Spunky Eclectic is doing a stashdown. I took a ton of pictures of the stash I want to spin down – mostly I want to spin down the stuff that is not appealing to spin, which is the white stuff I bought for dyeing, and some random stuff I bought to see how it spins (and sometimes it’s a combination of the two).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember the BFL/silk that my friend Jenn gifted to me? If you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Floating Down as fiber

The colorway is called “Floating Down”. Well, I got a 460 yards of a 15 WPI yarn from 4 oz, which is pretty good yardage:

Floating Down as yarn

As for the Color Me Pretty Sweater for my niece, it’s coming along. But it’s knitting, so I’m not really focusing on it. I did get some knitting on it done Friday night, during Tony’s gig. The sweater is full into the body now, and it’s stockinette in the round all the way for a few more inches. It will be good plane knitting. As for Tony’s gig – it was not his usual stuff, but if you want to hear all 45 minutes of awesomeness (Tony’s the one playing the piano), just download the link on this page. It’s 432 Mb so it might take a while. I hope you enjoy it!

I also worked a little more on a baby sweater for my co-worker. The baby has been here for a few weeks already! I’ll probably prioritize finishing this first, and then finishing the Color Me Pretty sweater. All this spinning is really driving home the fact that I need to knit up what I already have! It doesn’t help that I’m part of 2 spinning clubs, and get 12 oz of fiber each month. I’ll likely drop the batt club that I’m in, I’ve found that I prefer spinning top to batts….but I don’t hate spinning batts, either! I really love the yarn I get from the batts, though…mostly because I get a lot of sparkle in them. April’s shipment will be 6 months in the club…I may wait it out and do a year, who knows?

Weaving? None. But I signed up for a bi-monthly weaving club, that ships in the even months, so in 2 weeks I’ll have something to weave. Yeah, I should probably cancel my batt club, since I’m doing the weaving club.

I also spun up some mystery wool. It was white, and somewhat of a longwool, but not as coarse as Wensleydale. I want to say it’s Romney, because that’s what it feels like, but I can’t imagine when I had some white Romney around or bought some. I did have some shetland, but I recall it being more downy than what this is….anyway, there was only a little bit of it, 11g = 3/8 ounce, and I did a 2-ply and got 38 yards out of it. Then I dyed it apricot (who knew green + pink = apricot? Not me!) and it’s hanging to dry now.
Last weekend, Fiber Camp is about getting the community together to learn from each other. Getting high-quality instruction from top-notch industry experts costs a lot – these industry experts often need to travel, as well as feed their families and pay rent/mortgage. The Common Cod Fiber Guild does a great job of having industry experts at bimonthly meetings, but once a year they mix things up.

Registration is very inexpensive – $40 for 2 days is the most expensive it gets, and that’s if you are not a member of the guild. You can also buy day passes for $25 if you can only make one day. The way it works is that there is a call for workshops among the community – you just edit a wiki page and add your suggestions for topics. You can suggest a topic you would like to see and suggest a topic you can teach. For example, here is the list of session topics from the 2012 Fiber Camp.

The schedule starts to get filled in by the people who are teaching (“enabling”) the sessions. Fiber Camp allows people to schedule workshops during Fiber Camp itself, and because of this, the schedule cannot be completely full before the weekend starts. This allows people to schedule workshops they had not thought of before.

Workshops are either 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a perfect amount of time to “taste” a skill. For example, last year I learned how to spin on a drop spindle. This year I’m a spinning fiend. But I probably would not have paid $40 for a short beginner workshop to learn, because why spend the money if you don’t know if you’re going to like it? And I certainly would not have paid hundreds of dollars for a half-day or all-day intensive workshop from an industry expert.

That’s the great thing about Fiber Camp – because you have not invested a lot, if you find yourself not liking a skill, you can actually leave the room and go somewhere else, or just be content to sit and listen without practicing the skill. Then again, if you find yourself loving a skill, you learn just enough to get you started, and just enough to let you know that yes, you do want to take a longer/more intensive class.

Now, I’ve been separating “community” and “industry expert” so far in this post. But in reality, they are one and the same. Folks who want to learn double knitting can do so from Alasdair Post-Quinn because, guess what, he’s local to Boston. There are no travel costs involved for him. Did I learn spinning from Abby Franquemont? No, because she lives in the midwest, and it would be unfair to ask her to travel, stay in a hotel room, and give a short workshop when she is not getting reimbursed for her travel/hotel expenses. But I learned from Guido Stein, and I learned enough to know now that I want to take a class from Abby.

There are also vendors, so you can stock up on supplies if you want. The vendor area is also the “hangout” area, and plenty of people hang around there, too. There is a swap table too, where you can drop off or pick up fiber, magazines/books and other supplies (crochet hooks, needles, etc). I dropped off a lot of yarn that was being unloved, including some of my own handspun, and picked up a few magazines/books.

So, on to the fun. What did I learn/get from Fiber Camp this year?

Well, first off, I taught the Sweet Tomato Heel by Cat Bordhi. I already posted the PDF handout. I prepared the handout in advance, and there were a few people who told me they could not make my workshop because there were others going on. “No problem,” I said, “here’s the handout.” Folks really appreciated being able to have something they can look at, because they can try the skill themselves at home.

I not only learned how to make a duct tape mannequin, I made one. Or rather, other folks made one of me – mine is the one in the middle:

I learned how to use conductive thread to make gloves that I can manipulate a smartphone with.

And from the swap table, I picked up some cotton and cotton/linen yarn, a pattern booklet (Reynolds, volume 66 “International Cables by Mary of Holland”), 2 Vogue Knitting magazines with patterns I like (Fall/Winter 1982 and Holiday 1986), and the big score, a Kaffe Fassett book – Kaffe’s California Patches, Kaffe Fassett for Rowan.

Now, I have been looking for a “Cosby sweater” pattern for a few years now. See, my husband actually likes them. While it was Koos Van Den Akker who designed the real Cosby sweaters, Kaffe Fassett is a designer who makes patterns that look like Cosby sweaters. (Actually, while at Fiber Camp, I was told that Kaffe designed Cosby sweaters, and I thought he was the designer, but as I went to check my sources, I realized I was wrong. Always check your sources!)

So anyway, I now have a book of some pretty awesome geometric sweater patterns (think Q-bert). And a pattern to knit for my husband….eventually.

Loopy Wicker Cowl

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
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As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

In hindsight, and the world is a very big place.
Gary Whizin, as interviewed by Matt Asay, http://planetmysql.org/entry.php?id=8058
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now…or, perhaps not.

I also designed a small cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm contest – basically, come up with an original design using 1 or 2 skeins of Chadwick or Willa. My design, called the Loopy Wicker Cowl, is shown below, in both a one-color/one-skein and two-color/two-skein version:

If the design does not get selected for the contest, I will share it with you here.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:

On my wheel right now – I am working on finishing up a bunch of Louet Black Diamond Top, which is carbonized bamboo. There is absolutely no memory in this, and spinning it is not a whole lot of fun, but I spun a bunch of it and plied it with a merino wool for a scarf, so I kinda want to spin the rest of it just to have it done, and ready to be plied with something else at some point.

I also have plenty of fiber waiting to be spun, I have to get to January’s Spunky Eclectic club, which is Targhee in blues, reds and white. The February club will come soon! I also have the February batt from Enchanted Knoll Farm waiting for me, it’s in the colorway of valentine conversation hearts, but I have not even opened up the package yet!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
As a first post, if you’d like to see things on a larger scale.

I will start with completed projects, since that’s always the most satisfying, right?

I finished spinning Spunky Eclectic’s “Peace On Earth” – the Dec 2011 fiber club offering – a South African Fine yarn in blue, greenish and white. The singles were done last week, and I n-plied it yesterday and washed it. Normally I thwack, but since this yarn was described as “felts well” I just soaked it in hot water twice and followed up with a cold water soak. I am pretty pleased with the results, and I have to say this yarn bloomed very wonderfully – it was about 16 wpi before washing, 9 wpi afterwards:

I was going to make a Citron shawl from this, but it’s much too large for that, now.

On my needles, I am almost done with my Sagrantino Shawl:

I like the pattern, it’s one of those where you have one thing to remember and the pattern just works out magically, so it’s great that I don’t have to lug around a pattern with me. However, each hexagon takes me about 2 hours, so it takes a long time to complete!

I have also been working on Monkey Socks – special thanks to my knitsky friend Amanda who pointed out that this wasn’t a crazy Cookie A. pattern, but something that’s memorizable (and she’s right!). Right now I am working on the heel but I will rip it out and work it as a Sweet Tomato Heel from the ingenious Cat Bordhi. I may also go up a needle size because the sock is a tight fit right now:

The yarn is handspun superwash corriedale, the Tartan colorway from the September 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club offering. I spindle-spun this, and made 1,000 yards of 3-ply yarn (yes, that means I made 3,000 yards of this. I am extremely proud of this accomplishment). So there is plenty for socks!

I have also started on a kid-sized hat in double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn. The hat is Bratach from his excellent book Extreme Double Knitting: New Adventures in Reversible Colorwork. Alas, I can only take one of either the extreme double knitting or the adventures in reversible colorwork, and I chose the double knitting – the hat started out with the crazy pattern that Alasdair wrote, but I have changed it to be stripes and checkerboards and stuff. I messed up the first few rows due to it all being new to me, but I’ve got the hang of it now. I probably *should* rip out the hat and start over, but I am not sure if I will. Here is what my Not a Bratach looks like right now:

From the files of “not really actively knitting this one” but still a WIP, I am knitting Channel out of 2 different handspun yarns (handspun by me). One is the Oct 2011 Spunky Eclectic fiber club, Romney in the colorway “Beans”, which was spun as a single. The other yarn is a 2-ply yarn, consisting of Juniper Moon Farm Cormo and the Enchanted Knoll Farm’s Happy Hooves Batt Club’s Dec 2011 offering, “Winter’s Night Sky” in 65% superwash merino and 35% tussah silk. I have not worked on it in a while, but I do want to finish it eventually:


So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
So, . It looks great, and feels even better. It’s the perfect heel shape, and for once a knitted sock I made actually looks like it goes on a foot, even when laid flat:

I am excited to teach this method (and show off the sock) at FiberCamp in less than 2 weeks!
This month’s and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?

Here’s the rest of the batt – I get it with super duper extra sparkles:

And here’s what I’ve spun up so far:

This month’s but Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. I spun some last year that was 100% Shetland, and the sparkly batt using a base of Shetland and silk is just as dreamy as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, I’ve spun up about half of it. The colors are very bold, and I think this is destined to become a Citron…what do you think?


I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make
I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

I am on a work trip to California this week, so yesterday I had some nice long stretches of time in which to knit.

I FINALLY finished the Sagrantino Shawl, I finished it before I went on any flights and weaved in all the ends from my Boston->New York City flight (45 minutes). It is currently being blocked in my hotel room – I had to jury rig a setup, because at home I just use regular straight pins on a foam blocking board. The setup is blocking the top half now, I’ll have to block the bottom half separately after this is dry:

I also finished the Monkey sock, with a Sweet Tomato Heel. This was also finished before my flights.

I managed to write and print up my instructions for the Sweet Tomato Heel sock that I’m going to teach at FiberCamp this weekend, so I am all ready, and I’ll post those instructions here later in the week, as a blog post and an accompanying PDF.

In my first checkin post I neglected to mention a scarf I’m making for my husband, Tony. It is being made from a handspun I made, a 2-ply of Louet Black Diamond (carbonized bamboo) and what was labeled 100% wool (seems like merino) from the Lancaster Yarn Shop. Tony went on a trip and brought me back 3 bumps of 1.2 oz each – 2 bumps were blue and one was purple, and it combined really well with the Black Diamond:

Tony asked me to make him a scarf, and I thought the black/purple combination would work well, so given the yarn stats I looked for a pattern on Ravelry, and told Tony to choose a pattern. Well, he chose Crooked Little Scarf, and lately he’s been asking me when it’s going to be finished. Before yesterday’s flight it had only a few inches. I am happy to say it is over 12 inches long now, after a good 6-hour flight yesterday:

Last week I did do some spinning, because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much spinning this week while I’m away – I have brought my spindles and my wheel in the past, but there are evening fun activities for the team so I decided I wasn’t going to bring all that stuff, I could just bring my knitting so I’d always have something to do. That being said, I put up 2 new skeins.

The first skein is the Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt for February 2012, the colorway is called “Conversation Hearts”. It’s a Shetland/silk blend, and Shetland is one of my favorite fibers to spin. This spin did not disappoint me:

The second skein is also an Enchanted Knoll Farm Happy Hooves Batt, from November 2011, called “Crunchy Leaves”. It was sent as a boucle kit, and I put it aside for when I was ready to actually spin a boucle yarn. Well, a different rav group put out a boucle challenge, so I decided to give it a go. I’m not a fan of boucle yarns, and I also am very methodical and don’t generally like chaotic yarns, so I made a somewhat tame boucle – I think I did a good job for my first time out, but I know how I would spin things differently now to make it more boucle-y.

Edited October 29, 2012 – Unfortunately, Cat Bordhi has asked me to take the PDF instructions down. However, the same exact information is at the video I link to below, so you can still find the information you need.

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, the book currently has 63 pages (62 plus a title page) and right now has 9 patterns – there will be 11 total, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable. [Sadly, I have now had to take this information down]

I taught this at FiberCamp this past weekend, and since I made a handout I figured why not share it with you?

I made the handout based on what I learned from Cat Bordhi’s own video at http://bit.ly/sweettomheel. I bought
Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel Socks: an ebook after making the instructions – I bought the book because I love the Sweet Tomato Heel and even though I already know how to do it, and folks who purchase the book get the updates, so whenever those last 2 patterns come out you will get them. The book also has great troubleshooting information and a few versions of the Sweet Tomato Heel, like the padded sweet tomato heel.

Buying the book was my way of saying “Thanks, Cat!” I understand that not everyone can do this, and that’s OK. I feel it’s OK to share this information because Cat herself shares it in a free YouTube video. I waited until after I wrote up the instructions so I wasn’t tempted to use the same language Cat did in the book, and thus plagiarize. If there is a problem, please definitely contact me, and I will change or take down whatever material is objectionable.

PDF download of the instructions I wrote up for how to do Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel.
I posted about a week ago about what I was doing. My status is still the same, I have to cast on for the 2nd Monkey Sock, and I’m still working on the Crooked Little Scarf. What is new is that I went to Fiber Camp
I created the Loopy Wicker Cowl for the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest. The basic guidelines were to use up to 2 balls of either Willa or Chadwick. This is a very quick knit, plus 2 stitches).


And special thanks to photographer Susan Gibbs and model Caroline Fryar of Juniper Moon Farm for allowing me to republish this photo from the blog post about the contest finalists:

Loopy Wicker Cowl
Size – one size fits most adults

Materials:
1 ball Chadwick
(if making the 2-color version, 2 balls Chadwick)
This pattern uses 70-80 yards of yarn in total.

Size 8 (US) needles
1 button

Gauge: 18 sts and 27 rows over 4 inches / 10 cm in stockinette

Pattern notes: On the odd numbered rows, the yarn is wrapped twice around the needle when purling. These extra wraps are dropped in the even numbered rows and are what makes the long loops that form the wicker-like pattern.

Cast on 26 stitches.

Row 1 (WS): Purl entire row, wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making the purl stitch.

Row 2 (RS): Dropping each extra wrap, K1, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in back, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 1 st remains. K1.

Row 3: same as row 1

Row 4: Dropping each extra wrap, K4, *sl 3 to cable needle and hold in front, k3, k3 from cable needle, repeat from * until 4 sts remain. K4.

Repeat rows 1-4 until the cowl is 20 inches long (50 cm). Bind off by purling. Finishing by sewing a button on one end.

To make the 2-color version, cast on 10 stitches in main color, then 6 stitches in contrast color, then 10 stitches in main color. Follow the pattern as written but always use the same color to knit as the stitch below is.